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Looking for the Anti-Bloomberg

September 12, 2013 12:54 pmSeptember 12, 2013 12:54 pm

With Dave Weigel calling Tuesday’s outcome in New York’s mayoral primary (which turned on liberal angst about stop and frisk and economic inequality) and Colorado’s recall elections (which turned on conservative backlash against gun control) a defeat for the “ethos of Bloombergism,” this seems like a good time to highlight Jonathan Chait’s excellent New York Magazine essay on Michael Bloomberg’s worldview and (deluded) presidential ambitions. Chait does a fine job of capturing the essential elements of Bloombergism, from the authoritarian governing style to the distinctive “pink police state” approach to social policy (sexual freedom and bike lanes for me, stop and frisk and soda bans for thee), and he cuts to the heart of why Bloomberg’s overall agenda wasn’t really perfectly calibrated to the median voter’s allegedly post-partisan desires, as so many of the mayor’s Acela Corridor fans wanted to believe:

Bloomberg’s faith that bureaucratic competence would allow him to escape partisan division was merely naïve, but his apparent belief that his views on national politics situated him in the center is downright bizarre. He is a conventional social liberal. To the degree that he has separated himself from the Democratic Party, he’s done it mainly by articulating more outspoken versions of the standard liberal view on climate change, gun control, immigration reform, and gay marriage. Yes, Bloomberg assailed Obama for lacking a plan to reduce the budget deficit, which sounds conservative, except that Bloomberg’s own proposal included ending all the Bush tax cuts, not just those for the rich. (The last prominent politician to advocate that? Howard Dean.)

Bloomberg did position himself clearly to Obama’s right in one way, and it was very telling: He robustly defended the rich in general, and Wall Street in particular, from the widespread public revulsion it has faced since the economic crisis. Far from clashing with the general liberal cast of Bloomberg’s ideological profile, this one piece completes it. Bloomberg is the candidate of the Democratic Party’s donor class. He stands for the things the $50,000-a-plate social liberals wish Democratic politicians would say if they weren’t so afraid of how it would play in Toledo. Bloombergism at a national level is merely Democratic Party liberalism stripped of any concern for public opinion.

I would only quibble with the last line. A politician who’s more authoritarian on crime and civil liberties than the current Democratic Party and more sympathetic to the rich and Wall Street doesn’t represent “liberalism stripped of any concern for public opinion.” He represents (to borrow Chait’s earlier, more accurate formulation) the Democratic Party’s donor class stripped of any concern for public opinion, which is to say a politics that’s genuinely to the right of most Democratic voters on some important policy fronts. Which is why the widespread view of Bloombergism as more centrist than Obama-era liberalism isn’t entirely misplaced: Bloomberg doesn’t represent the center, but he embodies a potential meeting point for right and left — a place where rich Republicans and rich Democrats can unite to fend off the class warriors of the left and the culture warriors of the right. (There is a reason why so many members of the G.O.P.’s donor class would like to see the party move in Hizzoner’s direction on social issues.)

But this also means that an anti-Bloombergist politics — populist rather than technocratic, more culturally conservative but also less reflexively pro-rich — would have an equally plausible claim to be centrist. And it certain ways, since Bloomberg’s centrism is fundamentally elitist, an anti-Bloomberg centrism would have a more plausible path to political power, if not necessarily to governing success.

In the American context no such politics has crystallized, and perhaps (to my sorrow) it never will. But in the spirit of optimism, it’s worth highlighting an example from elsewhere in the Anglosphere that actually fits the profile reasonably well. That would be Australia’s incoming prime minister, Tony Abbott, who has basically ridden a kind of anti-Bloombergism to power down under — campaigning against the carbon tax and taking a fairly conservative line on social issues, but also playing a little pro-family class warfare, promising to finance more generous benefits for parents with a tax increase on high-earning companies. (My old co-author Reihan Salam has an interpretation of Abbottism that’s worth your time.)

An anti-Bloombergist politician will never be a media darling, because the establishment press is Bloombergist when it isn’t straight-up liberal — and sure enough, his positioning on climate change and immigration has already earned Abbott withering treatment from liberal publications here in the U.S., while his pro-family populism has earned him the disdain of The Economist (the most Bloombergist publication going). But for those of us who like to imagine a center-right politics that reaches for a very different center than one that New York’s mayor has embodied for the last decade, the incoming Australian P.M. will be an interesting figure to watch.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.